The Varnished Truth: Getting the news from Comedy Central

The Varnished Truth: Getting the news from Comedy Central

One day last fall, an explosion of texts and tweets about police brutality began to appear on the Internet concerning an incident at the Occupy Cal protests on the steps of Sproul Hall at the University of California, Berkeley. Because most college students have camera phones, many captured on video footage of officers beating students, dragging a professor across the lawn by her hair and kneeling on the neck of a student being handcuffed. I saw the footage myself for the first time that night on “The Colbert Report,” where Stephen Colbert quoted from an Associated Press story that described the violence as “pulling people from the steps and nudging others with batons.”

“Yes, ‘nudging,’” Colbert noted in his deadpan delivery as the footage rolled, “just like the Rodney King nudging. Or when Bull Connor set up that slip-’n’-slide in Birmingham.”

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The studio audience howled and so did viewers, judging by the frequency with which Colbert was quoted afterward. Note that there’s a lot going on between the delivery and the viewer in moments like that. First, Colbert is presuming a fairly high level of cultural literacy on the part of his viewers (Bull Connor is not a household name anymore); second, the joke implies that both Colbert and his audience share a reflexive distrust of the way a venerable news organization like the Associated Press delivers content; and third, much of Colbert’s audience (including me) was getting their news from what is explicitly a comedy show.

With Quips and Cynicism

“The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” (where Colbert got his start) has a similar modus operandi. It delivers news wrapped in comedy, pop-culture references and often an ironic distance from momentous historical events. When President Obama announced an impromptu televised press conference last May to deliver news that would capture world headlines (the death of Osama bin Laden), Jon Stewart quipped, “As Hollywood has taught us, when a black president interrupts your show, a meteor is headed for the earth.” There’s that combination again—humor, cynicism about the entertainment element of the news cycle and a pop-culture reference that the audience can take satisfaction in recognizing. (It has been 14 years, after all, since Morgan Freeman announced the earth’s impending destruction in “Deep Impact.”)

Despite a brief jump last year in viewers of the Big Three evening national news broadcasts, Nielsen Media Research has shown a steady decline in the audience for these television programs since 2001. Some of this is due to the growth of the Internet and the transformation of the news cycle into a 24/7 enterprise. Gone are the days when a company could issue bad news on a Friday afternoon and hope that by Monday someone else’s gaffes would occupy the attention of reporters. But much of the decline is also attributable to a sea change in the way Americans receive information and interact with public figures. Ask your friends and family where they get their news; if you’re talking to someone under a certain age, they will likely say Stewart or Colbert.

Why Comedy?

But Stewart and Colbert are comedians, not news anchors. Colbert’s entire shtick originated as a mockery of Bill O’Reilly’s punditry from the right on “The O’Reilly Factor.” Why do jokesters bring many of us so much of our news? Are we shallower than our parents? Do we need sugar with our medicine? Are we more cynical than previous generations, refusing to accept information without ironic distance? The answer is complicated.

First, there has been an erosion of trust in “the news” as anything approaching the truth. This is a positive development in many ways. It is naïve to assume that Walter Cronkite could be trusted to deliver unvarnished truth, or that The New York Times delivers “all the news that’s fit to print.” We all have biases and blind spots and cut some intellectual corners. That has been apparent ever since a sitting president assembled an “enemies list” that put journalists among his nemeses. The media have their own agenda, and so does everyone they report on. So does the audience. If you watch the commercials between news segments on NBC, ABC or CBS (ads for medical care, defenses against crime and “how to protect your assets” are ubiquitous) you’ll see that the content follows certain motifs, like the fear of change. Mainstream news programs routinely report on the ways in which “our way of life” is being threatened or destroyed and seldom acknowledge that such ways of life are unsustainable or contrary to the public good. écrasez l’infâme to all that.

Second, we have seen a cultural shift in the relative importance of personality as it relates to content. This is as true of Colbert and Stewart as it is of O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. Can you remember the particular personality characteristics of Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings or Dan Rather? Or do they blend together? Those anchors of the 1980s and ’90s were deliberately bland to reflect an Everyman persona. But with hams like Stewart and Colbert, much of their viewer appeal is tied up in their personality, regardless of the content. In fact, we’re usually waiting for the laugh more than for the news they riff on. The flip side of this focus on personality is delight in the failure of such persons to live up to the standards their cultic status places on them. One can see again Limbaugh’s public scandals here, or the endless speculation among Catholic media about Colbert’s background. (Is he a catechist? Does he have 11 children? Does he go to Mass every week? Does he really hate liturgical dance?) As much as we want the person to exemplify the content, we place a surprising amount of weight on that public personality’s private affairs.

Third, these shows have become news sources because of the ever-increasing compartmentalization of information in U.S. culture. The worldwide revolution in communications has put much more information at our fingertips, but it has not changed our ability to process it. We tend to compartmentalize where we receive our input, and we want it from people who look and act like us.

A dangerous result is that one is confirmed repeatedly in one’s narrow worldview without having to listen to opposing perspectives. Of course, opposing views were not regularly offered by the “mainstream news” either. A hegemonic information culture has been replaced by a completely fractious one, not necessarily to the good.

Why is it that Colbert and Stewart, the darlings of liberal sophisticates and urban hipsters, convey their product through comedy, while O’Reilly, Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck convey theirs through personas of perpetual outrage? It has to do with the ways in which we put each other down. The great weapon of the social conservative is to suggest that his or her ideological opponents have no values and no moral center. The great weapon of the social progressive is to suggest that his or her opponents are unsophisticated rubes, not in on the joke. The anger and professional outrage one hears from conservative pundits is paralleled by the mocking, ironic tone of comedians on the left. Both sides play to particular audiences. It really is just entertainment.

One last question: if the news is becoming entertainment, and entertainment is delivering the news, will the generations that get their news from such shows be able to process world events and social trends in nuanced and thoughtful ways? If our sources of information are filtered through the comic instincts of teams of writers with particular interests and biases, won’t we be increasingly polarized around political and social issues? The writer Joe Keohane presented evidence to support that view in an essay in The Boston Globe last year: when we Americans are confronted with information contrary to our strongly held views, we tend to become even more deeply convinced of what we already believed. Worse, Keohane found that the more “politically sophisticated” you think you are, the less likely you are to accept facts contrary to your worldview.

There is something troubling about a culture of information that relies on laughs at the foibles of ideological strangers. While these shows are not going away, it might be a valuable corrective to recover some sense of the comic axiom that the most fruitful target of humor is ourselves.

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Mary Sweeney

5 years 6 months ago

I too find it disturbing to consider what passes as "news" these days. I see the pictures and videos of the march today in the streets of Moscow and yet note that it received very little play today. Instead there was repeated reference to the clearing of a woman in Australia whose child was said to have been taken by a dingo back in 1980. Really??? I am sure that Colbert could make some sharp comments on that contrast, and they should be made.

Today we have to do our own searching for news and the internet is frankly the best tool. Humor can be very powerful in unmasking the falseness of reporting. When one sees a video taken on a cell-phone clearly showing physical violence and a reporter describes it as nudging, the report obviously has no credibility. One is left wondering whether the Pentagon Papers would even see the light of day in today's news media. If they were to be published today, it would be through Wikileaks, not our newspapers.

Debra Wolfe

5 years 6 months ago

Although written over 25 years ago, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, is a classic observation about the changing culture of media and its effects on information delivery, i.e., news. In the first chapter of the book, he writes the following: “Not long ago, I saw Billy Graham join with Shecky Green, Red Buttons, Dionne Warwick, Milton Berle and other theologians in a tribute to George Burns, who was celebrating himself for surviving eighty years on show business. The Reverend Graham exchanged one-liners with Burns about making preparations for Eternity. Although the Bible makes no mention of it, the Reverend Graham assured the audience that God loves those who make people laugh. It was an honest mistake. He merely mistook NBC for God.” At least Colbert and Stewart are not pretending to be anything but comedians. I may be wrong, but I believe Ann Coulter fancies herself a serious journalist, not a highly-paid provocateur/entertainer.

Chris NUNEZ

5 years 6 months ago

IT IS ONLY THE COURT JESTER who can tell the truth to the king. Anyone else would have been beheaded.

What does that say about the fourth estate. Oh, excuse me, the fourth estate died a few years ago. Don't remember, it went with a whimper.

ofer barsadeh

5 years 6 months ago

the mistake is to take news as the primary product rather than knowledge and comments upon it in the wider sense. once there was no news. there was the revealed truth... as described usually by religious leaders (priests)/teachers(rabbis/immams) etc. then technology stepped in and allowed at first everone to read the scriptures for themselves. then came global communications that allowed the news media - the new priesthood - to describe "reality". and finally we have an infinite number of descriptions from an infinite number of sources coming through a large variety of channels. suddenly reality is indescripable. what is left is our own behavior within a self-defined context. what is left is the individual making choices .... best not to anger the individual.

RICHARD KUEBBING

5 years 6 months ago

Excellent work and excellent analysis, Mr Keane. I hope and trust your superiors have work for you after graduation that will challenge your fine mind.

I gave up my tv 17 yrs ago and have not missed it. I would like to see an analysis of print media also. Its changes as its income declines are equally distressing.

STEPHANIE SIPE

5 years 5 months ago

Some things never change: http://www.opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/11/the-stephen-colbert-of-the-civil-war-2/

5 years 5 months ago

James,

I agree with your perspective and analysis except for your falling into the trap that Comedy Central news is the 180 degree equivalent of right-wing media punditry. Although your points on delivery by each group is correct, your content analysis fails.

Where as O'Reilly, Hannity and their compadres will never take a position that could be construed as a sign of support for moderate or liberal views on an issue, Colbert and Stewart will not only go after liberal icons, they also have no problem laughing at themselves (as per your last point).

BTW - Colbert doesn't have 11 kids, he is from a family of 11 kids.

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This article also appeared in print, under the headline "The Varnished Truth," in the June 18, 2012 issue.

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